She would understand this, his pale maiden. She would let him go into the dark alone and unafraid. There… there he would wait for her.

Beyond the room a bucket clanged, and someone muttered curses in another language.

"It might have gone differently for you if you had cooperated with us," Benait said, nodding as if in agreement with Gabriel's thoughts as he moved closer. "We would have brought you into the light with us, to fight for God. Eventually you might have redeemed your filthy soul."

The Brethren always felt compelled to make such speeches before they inflicted some monstrous ordeal upon him. Not for his benefit, Gabriel felt, but more to bestow some sort of absolution on themselves prior to committing their atrocities. It did not always work; one of the brutes in Dublin had begun to go mad, and whispered of his hallucinations to Gabriel.

Benait took out a Bible, opening it to the last chapter before he began to read a passage. "'… the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon…'"

They tried to use the Holy Scriptures as another, subtler form of torment, but Gabriel, named by his father for God's celestial messenger, had long ago made his peace with his fate. He was no angel, but he no longer believed the Kyn were cursed. He had seen too many atrocities in his human and Kyn lifetimes; crimes against humanity far more obscene and brutal than any of his own pitiful sins. The God he had served throughout his human life would not single out a handful of misguided warrior priests for divine retribution while permitting the butchers of millions to grow decrepit and die in beds of gold.

Metal scraped against brick with a softer, more liquid sound.

Benait finished reading the passage from Revelations, closed his Bible, and kissed the cover before setting it aside.

"You never made confession of your sins, vampire, and so there can be no absolution." He removed a small glass vial of reddish liquid from his sleeve and opened it. "But we still have one more use for your angelic face. Perhaps when this is finished, D'Orio will take your head and have it mounted on the wall of his study."

Gabriel's eyes shifted as an old, liver-spotted hand reached into the open entrance to his chamber and spread a layer of mortar onto the floor space between the sides of the frame. The trawl disappeared, and the same hand began laying bricks carefully in the wet mortar. He realized what was being done on the other side of the wall, a horror that swept away all that had been done before this moment. They were sealing the room. Sealing him in it.

He turned his face away and jerked against his chains.

"You would not see the light, vampire." Benait reached up and seized a handful of filthy hair, making Gabriel look at the bricks being stacked and mortared across the threshold of the chamber before he brought the vial toward his face. "Now all that you will know is darkness."

Chapter 2

A thousand kilometers from France, within the silent walls of a remote, well-guarded fortress in Ireland, another prisoner struggled against her imprisonment. This one did not accept her fate; nor did she retreat into silence. As she had every day since she had been brought to Dundellan Castle, Dr. Alexandra Keller fought and shouted.

"I don't want to go in there. I told you, it's not mine. Will you let go of me, you jackass?"

Richard Tremayne, high lord of the Darkyn, did not set aside the reports he had been studying, but finished reading details of the latest Brethren activity in the south of France. As Alexandra's protests grew closer and louder, he briefly considered the merits of soundproofing and onesided locking mechanisms. Neither would solve the problem of his latest, troublesome acquisition, but they might restore a semblance of peace to his early evenings.

Or the illusion of it, Richard thought as the sound of knocking startled his favorite tabby out of his lap. "Enter."

A footman appeared.

"Dr. Alexandra Keller, seigneur," the servant announced as Richard's seneschal and a guard dragged a small, writhing figure into the library.

"I was just out walking," she protested as they hauled her to stand in the pool of light before Richard's desk. "What, I'm not allowed to have fresh air?" She puffed out some air and blew some chestnut curls out of her face.

Black soil powdered her nose, cheek, and chin. "I'm supposed to be a guest, aren't I?"

The tabby cautiously approached the American and sniffed delicately at the bare toes of her dirty right foot. An unlaced, too-large trainer covered her left.

Few things annoyed the high lord of the Darkyn more than having his routine disrupted, but his unwilling houseguest likely thought it her right. Now dealing with her attempts to escape Dundellan had become almost a daily chore.

"Where did you find her this time?" he asked Korvel, his seneschal.

"By the bailey wall, my lord." Korvel, who also served as the captain of the guard, kept a firm grip on the doctor.

"It's a nice night for once, so I stepped outside," Alexandra insisted. Like his men, she did not look directly at him. "For a little walk. To get away from the endless sunshine and happiness of this place for a few minutes, okay? That's all."

Richard eyed her garments and remaining shoe, which he recognized as belonging to a junior porter. "Dressed as one of my household?"

"You took my clothes, and I'm tired of those stupid ball gowns." She lifted her chin. "You try wearing something that comes with five crinolines and a built-in corset; see how you like it."

"Indeed. And what is young Jamison wearing at this moment? Little more than torn strips of your bed linens knotted about his limbs, I daresay." When she scowled, he instructed the footman to go and search her rooms.

"We also found this"—Stefan, the guard, displayed an iron poker bent into the shape of a hook, to which a coil of rope had been tied—"hanging from the battlement behind her."

"I told you, it's not mine," the doctor insisted. "I have no idea how it got there. Maybe someone else left it behind when they climbed the wall. Shouldn't you be out looking for one of the other hostages?"

Korvel and Stefan exchanged a long-suffering look over the petite American's head.

Richard held out one gloved, distorted hand and took the hand-fashioned grappling device to inspect it. He was impressed; the thick iron had been bent as easily as if it were a thin reed. "I had not thought her this strong."

"She broke Martin's arm in two places after he apprehended her trying to jump from the rooftop last week, my lord," Korvel reminded him.

"I set Martin's arm after I broke it," Alexandra pointed out. "I also said I was very sorry and would try not to fracture anyone else's bones. Quit talking around me. I'm not one of your zombies."

Zombies. No one, not even Kyn, had ever dared refer to the humans Richard obtained and enraptured in such scathing terms. They were politely ignored, just as Richard's condition was. He went to her and bent close to her ear.

"I should cut out your tongue," he said softly, exercising a small amount of his talent. He knew just to what degree his powerful voice drilled into her head, causing her considerable if momentary pain.

Alexandra paled but stood her ground. "With that icepick voice of yours, why bother? You can tell me to shut up and I will. Or kill me. There are doctors all over the place; you can kidnap as many as you want." She stared into his eyes, and her scent washed over him. "Don't hold back on my account."

The idiot female wanted to provoke him into anger.

"Shall we take her to the lower level, my lord?" Stefan asked, a bit too eagerly. "Gunther has readied a cell. You have but to say." His gaze shifted to the top of Alexandra's head, and his free hand twitched, as if he meant to touch her hair.

Stefan and his dour dungeon master, like most of Richard's men, wanted nothing more than to have Dr. Keller at their mercy, to do as they pleased with her. That was the other problem with the American: Her presence had driven almost every male Kyn who served him into a constant state of appalled, confused lust.

"You're not throwing me in some dungeon," Alexandra said as she kicked Stefan and wrenched free of his hold. "Just let me out of here, Tremayne, or I'll—"

"Be quiet, Dr. Keller, and sit down." Richard watched his troublesome houseguest obey him, and then told the men, "Leave her with me now."

As his guards withdrew, Richard regarded the woman sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of his desk. She should have sat in one of his chairs, not on the floor. But his particular talent, a voice so powerful that a mere whisper of his could pleasure, control, maim, or even kill another being, did not always affect Alexandra in the usual manner. She should have obeyed him to the letter, but more often now she managed some small defiance of it.

Was she, as he suspected, neither human nor Darkyn, but something else? Something new?

Richard studied his prisoner. Alexandra did not meet any of his standards for beauty, but he could yet appreciate her particular attractions. Her unremarkable features and petite stature did not dim the exotic creaminess of her mixed-race skin, the brilliance of her clever brown eyes, or the subdued fire of her long chestnut curls.

Bitch though she was, Alexandra Keller radiated warmth and life like the beacon of a lighthouse in the midst of the winter storm.

Even her voice, edged as it generally was with sarcasm or contempt, proved very pleasant to the ear. Perhaps she had been gifted with more than a single talent. Talent that, according to her own research, affected Kyn as well as humans.

As tempted as he was, as dangerous as she might prove to be, he would not destroy such a woman. Not while she might be the only one capable of bringing the Kyn back from extinction, and giving him the means to at last prevail over the Brethren.

"These escape attempts become as vexing as they are useless," he said to her. "My men will not permit you to leave Dundellan unless I wish it. Do you not understand this, Dr. Keller?"

"I understand that you're a maniac," she said, all politeness. The tabby had crawled onto her lap, and she was stroking it absently. "You can't keep me here forever. Michael is coming for me. Anything else?"